A Few Days with GH Chapter 6
…Seven months pregnant and Sara looked as if she had swallowed a round ball. Her housekeeper came every day now. Sara knew this would be her last pregnancy; fatigue and her biological clock had sapped her energy and strength. She would have Grissom's son—this little boy would be the image of his father. Grissom laughed at her steadfast insistence that their son would look like him; she pointed to the two little girls who resembled him and smirked. She had known from the first week that she would have a boy—calling him Gilbert from her first test.
When all the testing was completed and showed a healthy male baby, she did not hide her delight. Her four children's excitement about another brother mirrored her own. Her husband would pretend to be unruffled by this event, but she knew he was as pleased—except when she called the baby Gilbert.
"Not Gilbert." He was adamant.
Eli was sitting at the desk with him when he repeated this remark. "Can we name him after me?" He asked.
Sara smiled as she asked, "What would we call him? We can't have two Eli's."
The boy put his chin in his palm. "I like William. We can call him Will Grissom."
Sara looked at Grissom. He looked at her. He said, "William Grissom. That's a good name, Eli."
Sara wrote the name on a piece of paper. She added a middle name and passed it to Grissom. "Eli," she said, "I think you've just named your brother." She patted her belly. "Will Grissom—I like that."
A week later, her routine check-up disrupted life as it had been. Sara watched the monitor as the technician, the physician, and a nurse studied the image.
The doctor's finger traced an area on the screen. "Sara, your baby is fine, but there is a problem." Her finger circled an area. "This is your placenta and it has attached to the wall of your uterus in an abnormal way—it's called placenta accreta." The physician had delivered her three other children. "Baby Grissom is fine, but it means bed rest for mom."
"Bed rest? What does that mean? I've never heard of accreta."
The doctor turned back to the screen, showing and explaining to her the excessive growth into the uterus by the placenta. "It has invaded the first layer of the uterus—hopefully, that's where it will stop. The worst event would be pre-mature delivery, and an unplanned C-section with a hysterectomy. We will plan—manage conservatively; put you to bed, keep the baby growing."
Tears had formed in Sara's eyes, pooled and ran down her face. The nurse passed tissues to her.
"This is something that is unusual, but it can be treated once diagnosed—we know what to do and it's not a surprise at delivery." The doctor explained. "Did your husband come with you?"
Sara shook her head.
"Let's get you dressed and we'll go over what you need to do. Do you still have help at home?"
Sara nodded. She seemed unable to speak.
The physician asked, "The girls are well? I saw the twins one day with their father. Are they as sweet as they look?"
Sara nodded again. "Bed rest. Will it be for another two months?"
"Get dressed. We will talk—you can call your husband so he can hear about this at the same time."
Sara got home in a daze. Grissom met her as she got out of the car.
"Four hours a day, Gil. I can be out of bed for four hours," she said as tears filled her eyes. She handed him a packet of papers as he embraced her.
"Don't cry—everything will be fine." He chuckled. "You've been sleeping more than you've ever slept. We'll get through this—time will fly by."
Days slowed to a snail's pace with an occasional breakout into chaos; shoes on the wrong person, a missing toy, hair clips lost, favorite pajamas left in the washing machine at bedtime. By the third day, everyone in the house was short-tempered or irritable or cranky. Lilly, the normally patient housekeeper, realized there was too much work for one person. Eli responded to his mother's bed ridden state by camping at the foot of her bed, grumbling when his sisters wanted to join him. Bizzy followed her dad so closely he stumbled over her more than once as he tried to get things done. Ava and Annie were confused; their mother could not pick them up, she stayed in bed nearly all day and their solution to this situation was to cry.
Grissom stifled a growing sense of panic. Sara was the household organizer, the financial planner, the family manager. For three days, he and the housekeeper held things together—sort of. The children were dressed, bathed, and fed. He had forgotten about a group coming to look at his beehives until they arrived just after Lilly had gone for groceries and the toast he left in the oven burned and set off the smoke alarm.
A/N: This one will be 10-12 chapters. Thanks for reading! Another one later today.
